I’m currently over 7,000 words ahead of schedule for book 7 (Final Match) of the Escape from the Abyss series. In case you couldn’t tell by the title, this is the last book of the series. I doubt if I’ll be able to sustain such a lead on productivity, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed. If I hold to the original schedule, the book will be ready to publish near the end of September or the first week of October.
The new covers are coming in August. Once I get the new covers on my books, I’ll crank up the ads again to see how the series performs. Having the right sub-genre-specific covers should help. This series did pretty well with ads before but only broke even.
I still haven’t settled on my next project. I will continue with another book right after Final Match is published. There will be no sabbatical or dead time after this book. I don’t want to get out of my writing habit. I spent several years building up the habit to the point where I’m able to easily write 2,000 words a day and never suffer from writer’s block. I might try my hand with another genre. If I do that, then I’ll have to come up with a pen name to isolate the genres on Amazon. Otherwise, their algorithms will get confused, and we certainly don’t want that.
Anyway, if I do a pen name, I’ll post it here, and a link to a new website (if necessary) so that anyone interested in other genres can go there and read those books.
What happens if I write in another genre?
Well, that depends on how lucrative it becomes. I’m studying mystery/murder with the possibility of writing in the Cozy Mystery subgenre. I may blend that with a bit of sci-fi, like a moon colony as the small community where the murders/crimes happen. To start off, I might just stick to the common themes and put my own twist on them. That way, I can see how my books will perform and not second-guess that people just don’t like moon colonies.
One thing that appeals to me in the cozy mystery genre is that the books are typically around 45k to 55k in length. Something I can write and publish in half the time, like a month for each book. Right now, I’m cranking out 90k novels every two months. And sci-fi is a tough genre to write in. Romance is the number-one-selling genre, followed by murder/mystery. Sci-fi is down further near the bottom of third place.
The number of sales doesn’t mean that the genre is easier to write in. There are probably more writers who create books in the top two genres, but the readers are voracious. I wish I were a romance reader, but that’s not my thing, so I’m not going to attempt it. I do, however, read mystery/murder and cozies, as well as watch a lot of them on TV. I also like hard-boiled and police procedurals. I will be writing some gritty, hard-boiled murder stories in the future, but those will probably fall under sci-fi. Probably involving borgs, and androids. Especially since I already have some pretty well-developed characters in mind.
Stay tuned.